This week, Dame Jacinda Ardern published an opinion piece in The Guardian declaring that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza. Her call for recognition of Palestinian statehood and an end to “military cooperation” with Israel coincided with a deeply flawed United Nations Commission of Inquiry (CoI) report that levelled the same accusation.
On the surface, Ardern’s comments appeal to compassion. She focused her article on maternal mortality in war zones, linking her advocacy with the International Rescue Committee’s Safer Births in Crises programme. Few would disagree that childbirth under bombardment is a tragedy. Yet invoking the word “genocide” is neither a matter of compassion nor of rhetoric — it is a legal charge of the gravest kind. And it must be judged against evidence, not emotion.
The CoI’s Credibility Crisis – link to IINZ op-ed on this
The UN Commission of Inquiry is not a neutral arbiter. Its three members (Navi Pillay, Chris Sidoti, and Miloon Kothari) have long histories of hostility toward Israel. Kothari, for example, was condemned worldwide for antisemitic remarks about “the Jewish lobby.” Israel rightly dismissed the Commission’s latest report as a fabrication, noting that it was based on Hamas-supplied data and ignored the terror group’s role in both starting and prolonging the war.
It is telling that the CoI declared Israel guilty of four out of five “genocidal acts” under the 1948 Convention, while never once investigating Hamas’s open calls for genocide against Jews or its deliberate embedding of fighters, weapons, and command centres in hospitals, schools, and civilian neighbourhoods. This is not impartial justice — it is lawfare designed to delegitimise Israel’s right to self-defence.
The Missing Context
Ardern’s op-ed omitted the most essential context: Hamas started this war on October 7, 2023, with a barbaric massacre that killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 250 hostages. To this day, 48 hostages remain in captivity, subject to abuse, starvation, and psychological torture. The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is real, but it is a direct consequence of Hamas’s strategy of maximising civilian suffering while diverting aid, hoarding fuel, and using its own people as shields.
Labeling Israel’s defensive response as “genocide” not only distorts international law but also absolves Hamas of its crimes. Worse still, it undermines the memory of real genocides (including the Holocaust) by diluting the term beyond recognition.
New Zealand’s Responsibility
As New Zealand’s Foreign Minister Winston Peters prepares to attend the UN General Assembly, where recognition of a Palestinian state will again be on the agenda, the government must tread carefully. Recognition without reform only rewards Hamas’s intransigence and corruption. It risks creating not a peaceful state alongside Israel, but another terror haven like Gaza — this time in Judea and Samaria.
Jacinda Ardern’s compassion for suffering mothers is laudable. But compassion must be grounded in truth. Repeating Hamas’s talking points and echoing a discredited UN inquiry does not advance peace. It only emboldens those who seek Israel’s destruction and leaves both Israelis and Palestinians trapped in cycles of violence.
The genocide accusation is not just false — it is dangerous. New Zealand should reject it unequivocally.
